By her twentieth birthday, there are a few things Valarie Ricci knows for certain.
She knows that her waitressing job barely covers the costs of living out of a beat up old van. She knows she's stuck in the dead end hometown her high school friends...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Keeled over on all fours, Valarie dry-heaved into the clear space beyond the threshold of the open motel door. A chemical stench thickened the air she was desperately trying to gasp into her lungs, burning her insides raw. It left a sickly taste in her mouth, like decomposed meat. "Oh, fuck." She screeched out between frantic breaths, hand muffling her mouth to keep back the bile dangerously close to rising up her throat. "Oh my God. Holy fuck."
She threw a wild look over her shoulder, feeling as if she were watching a predator closing in before her eyes flashed forward again. Her entire back spasmed, hair standing on end in the freezing cold room. "What the fuck?" She pressed a hand to her burning forehead, pushing away hair sticky with sweat. "Alice? Alice?"
"I'm here." And suddenly she was, her body crouched beside Valarie in the doorway, positioned between Valarie and... the thing still standing by their bed. "You're okay."
Valarie blindly groped towards her. "Alice?"
Strong, steady hands engulfed her own. "What do you smell?"
"It–It's like a hospital," Valarie choked out. "But worse, way worse. Like someone poured disinfectant down my throat. Oh, God. It's so bad. You don't smell that?"
"Peach schnapps."
"What?"
"That's what I smell whenever she shows up. Like you said, like it's down in my throat or my chest. Really strong and disgusting."
"What–?"
"What do you see?"
"I can't." Valarie kept her gaze firmly down towards their clasped hands. "I don't want to."
"Valarie." As always, Alice took her time with the name, voice steady as a rock. "She can't hurt you."
"Can she hurt you?"
Alice paused. "No, she can't hurt me either. Trust me." Valarie's eyes latched onto Alice's, to the certainty that rested there like some mundane miracle. She was sure she'd never seen anything quite like it before. "Please."
Trust me.
Without breathing, Valarie collapsed against the door frame, back pressed painfully against the trim, and she lifted her gaze. "I... I see Grace."
The ghost of Grace Bell did not look dead. She did not move like a dead woman. She did not sound like a dead woman.
She looked exactly as she did in the pictures that had been printed in the newspapers, the missing person posters, shared on Facebook and splashed across the evening news. Her lips and nails were a matching blood-red shade, so vibrant they almost glowed beneath the yellowed motel lights. The same knitted sweater and ripped, washed-out jeans, the same relaxed curls, and the same cold beauty. Like she had not missed a beat of her life in the past two years, like she could walk back into that shrine of a bedroom that was waiting, untouched, for her back in Valentine and everything would go back to how it was before.
